SchoolCIO: Bring Your Own Network (BYON)

So you’re letting your students BYOD
and it’s going well. You’re saving
money because students are bringing
in their own technology, teachers are
excited to be using digital resources,
and your superintendent is telling
everyone you’re a 21st-century district.

It sounds too good to be true and, sadly, it is.

Now your students are curious. They’ve
realized the school network is slow, filtered, and
will take longer to access with only a 15-minute
lunch period. Perhaps they’ve discovered MyFi,
softAP, and WiFi tethering applications that
allow them to bypass your managed network
and surf the Web without your controls in place.
Even worse, since students are doing this on
school property, you are responsible for their
behavior.

What’s an overworked CIO to do?

Solution #1: AUP to the
Rescue

“There’s no magic to it,” says Joe Prchlik,
director of operations and technology for the
Northwest Ohio Computer Association, which
provides wireless services for 25 districts across
the state. “The best solution is to enforce your
acceptable use policy (AUP). We see it as a
classroom- or school-management issue.”

Prchlik uses Cisco-hosted controllers that
allow him to manage access points and provide
weekly reports to his schools. IT directors can
use the reports to identify rogue networks within
their environment.

Carl Behmer, supervisor of technology and
information for Paso Robles (CA) Joint Unified
School District, agrees with Prchlik that
districts need to have strict policies in
place. “When you embrace BYOD , you
are accepting its potential
complications, such as wireless hotspots where
students can MyFi off their phones. Legally, we
can’t put cameras out there, and my district can’t
afford equipment that searches for rogue devices
every minute.” Instead, Behmer turns to his
AUP. “If a kid is doing something wrong and is
found out, the disciplinary committee has to deal
with it.” Behmer points out that even if a district
isn’t doing BYOD , students can try to use their
own networks to connect.

Solution #2: It’s a Matter
of Trust

Although many administrators may lose
sleep over this suggestion, Behmer says that
once his district simply trusted the students with
their devices, BYO N became less of a problem.
He knows that a small percentage of students
are still breaking the rules, but he realizes it’s
something he can never completely stop. “Our
schools are surrounded by houses. If someone
sets up a wireless access point at a house that’s
25 feet away from the campus, there’s nothing
I can do. It comes back to responsibility and us
monitoring our students. But if they want to get
around it, they will. The kids are ahead of us.”

Solution #3: Teach
Responsibility

“When we first started implementing a
wireless network a year and a half ago, our
students were using it before we announced it,”
laughs Pat Karr, network services manager for
McAllen (TX) Independent School District.
“Every one of these kids is a hacker by trade—
and that’s not a bad thing.” Karr understands
that students get bored and try to circumvent
security procedures and policies. “They aren’t
being malicious,” he insists. “They don’t believe
they should be filtered, and they want to ‘beat the
establishment.’”

To make the school network more appealing,
Karr’s district became less stringent about
filtering while remaining CIPA-compliant. Karr
runs four 5800-series controllers that handle
500 access points apiece. He relies on Cisco and
AirWatch to help him manage his 1,600 access
points throughout the district.

Still, he believes he can mitigate BYON
through education. “We have to tell teachers and
students that they won’t be allowed to BYOD
if they bypass our rules. We have to educate
the parents and community as well, because a
collaborative effort results in good synergy.”

Solution #4: Make Your
Network the Place to Be

Andrew Wallace, director of technology at
South Portland (ME) Schools, found out about
BYON when a teacher couldn’t print but could
get to unfiltered websites. Wallace quickly
realized the teacher had inadvertently connected
to a student-created rogue WiFi hotspot. “As
more and more wireless providers allow for
tethered Internet access via a cell data plan and students become more
savvy at jailbreaking smartphones, this is something schools will need
to be keenly aware of and develop policies around,” he says.

As a Maine district, South Portland has been a 1:1 school for a decade,
so it’s not surprising that the students are pushing the envelope. “Students
live in the cloud. They don’t need our file storage. Why use a schoolprovided
laptop if your phone gets to Google more quickly?”

For Wallace, the key is to make your wireless network so
robust that students don’t want to go off on their own. He
suggests that districts invest in the fastest Internet speed possible
and come up with incentives to keep students on your district’s
network. Wallace asked teachers and librarians to curate
high-quality videos from YouTube and other sources and made
them available on intranet. He’s also investigating background
computer scripts that would be installed on student machines.
The scripts would periodically check that the computer was on
the school’s network (if in the district) and would default to the
school network if the machine was not already on it.

But perhaps the smartest thing South Portland did was to buy
MinecraftEdu (minecraftedu.com), an educational version of the
phenomenally popular game. “It’s on an amazing server so students have
a positive experience,” Wallace says. “They’re using it to do great things,
like build replicas of the Battle of Gettysburg or construct the Jamestown
colony. We are making it worth their while to stay on the network.”

Networking Tools

Centralized management is an
important first step in getting control
of BYON . These companies make
products that can help you do that.

Mobile device management (MDM) products lets you manage and support
all of the mobile devices throughout your buildings. It makes it easier to
distribute apps, data, and configuration settings. Here are some companies
that offer MDM solutions.